Bristling at the suggestion of impropriety, she exclaimed, “I don't need a lawyer to lecture me about honesty!”
“Then tell us this,”I said, lashing back. “Just what was it Jeremy Fullerton wanted to talk to you about that night? Just what was the reason you stopped at the St. Francis—because he wanted to talk about Mrs. Fullerton? Isn't that what you said?”
She exploded. Clenching its arms with all her might, she pushed herself straight up until she was barely touching the chair.
“All right!”she cried fiercely. “If you really have to know everything—if you really don't care about who gets hurt—I'll tell you! Jeremy wanted to talk. He wanted to talk about how things had become intolerable. He wanted to tell me that he had finally decided that no matter what the consequences he was going to leave her. He was going to divorce her, Mr. Antonelli! He was going to divorce his wife and marry me!”
The floor seemed to sink beneath me as I was buried under a solid black wall of noise. Instinctively, I looked up at the bench. Thompson was sitting there, glassy-eyed, like someone locked in a trance. Then, suddenly, his eyes blinked and began to dart all around the room. Furiously, he beat his gavel, louder and louder, until finally it began to be heard over the dwindling clamor of the crowd.
“I'll clear the courtroom if I have to!”he threatened.
Collecting myself, I waited until the last, lingering murmur had died away. I was not sure what I was going to ask Ariella Goldman next, but looking at her tear-stained face, I knew I could not afford to let it end there.
“You didn't come back directly from Europe, then, either, did you?”
“No,”she replied, trembling.
“You stayed there for a few days, along with Jeremy Fullerton, didn't you?”
She settled into the chair, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. “Yes.”
“That wasn't the first time you had been alone with him, was it?”
“No,”she said, the streaks on the side of her face beginning to dry.
“You'd been having an affair with him for some time, hadn't you?”
She shook her head, as if there were something I did not understand. “I didn't want to have an affair. That was the last thing I wanted to happen; but I fell in love with him, desperately, completely. And he fell in love with me.”
“And how long ago did this happen?”I persisted.
“We fell in love about a year ago,”she said, as if she were glad finally not to have to hide the way she felt.
“Is that how you happen to know that Mrs. Fullerton was, as you put it, disturbed—sometimes depressed, sometimes paranoid?”
“Yes. Jeremy told me. It's something she's had for a very long time. It's the reason Jeremy was never going to leave her.”
I was in control again, following each word of her answer, ready before she finished with the next, logical question.
“But you just said that he told you that night he was going to get a divorce and marry you.”
“Something had changed.”
“Something had changed?”I heard myself repeating before I had taken the time to think.
“Yes, something had changed. I'd just found out I was going to have his baby.”
Thompson beat his gavel again, but it was like throwing pebbles against the sea. The courtroom was in chaos as every reporter tried to be the first to fight his way out to call in the biggest story any of them had had since the night Jeremy Fullerton was murdered.
I
t was the headline in the late edition of the afternoon paper, the lead story on every local news show; it was the only thing anyone wanted to talk about. Under the “relentless”—a word used so often it seemed like the only word any reporter knew— cross-examination of Defense Attorney Joseph Antonelli, the Democratic candidate for governor, Ariella Goldman, admitted that she and Jeremy Fullerton had been planning to marry as soon as he obtained a divorce.
“ 'In tearful testimony,' ”read Albert Craven aloud from the newspaper he was holding in front of him, “ 'the former speech-writer of U.S. Senator Jeremy Fullerton …' ”
Craven stopped and looked up. “ 'Tearful testimony.' That's a good touch,”he remarked with a droll smile.
Slouched on one of the gray upholstered chairs in front of Craven's grotesque Victorian desk, I unfastened the top button of my shirt and loosened my tie. I was exhausted, too tired to do or say anything except look from Craven to my cousin, who was sitting next to me, and wearily shake my head. I knew what had happened; I knew it the moment Ariella Goldman announced she was pregnant with Fullerton's child; but I was still stunned—not by what she had done, but that with my eyes wide open I had walked right into it.
Bobby patted me on the shoulder and tried to tell me it was going to be all right. Silently, Craven went on reading. When he reached the end of the column on the front page, he spread open the double sheets, folding one back on the other, and continued the story. Though he apparently had been working without a stop since lunch, he looked as if he had just gotten dressed for dinner. His gray pin-striped suit was perfectly pressed, his pale blue silk shirt hung at just the right length beyond the sleeves of his coat. When he finally finished, he set the newspaper on the desk, off to the side of the stack of documents over which he had been laboring when we first walked in, and looked up.
With a rueful smile, I looked down at my feet stretched out in front of me.
“That 'relentless' cross-examination was maybe the best thing I've ever done.”
I raised my eyes, glancing first at Bobby, then at Craven. Neither of them had ever tried a case to a jury; neither of them had ever had to make the instantaneous decision to go one way or the other with an answer just given by a witness.
“I took her—Lawrence Goldman's daughter—all the way around a circle, over and over again, each time making it just a little tighter. I was not just one question ahead of her: I was at least a dozen questions ahead. With each answer she gave, I was already thinking about the way I was going to ask her the same question again—the second time, and the third time—questions I would not ask until I had first asked her seven, eight, nine other questions in between. It was like a dance—a tango— where each step has a meaning, but a meaning that only becomes completely clear when you reach the end of the dance. She was the perfect partner: She went with me every step.”
I shoved myself up until I was sitting almost straight, and then bent forward and rested my arms on my knees.
“She testified that she drove Fullerton to his car because his wife left early. On cross, I asked her why Fullerton's wife left early. She said it was because she wasn't feeling well and that she didn't know why she wasn't feeling well. I dropped it and asked her how long it had taken to drive from Goldman's apartment to where Fullerton had left his car. I asked her if they stopped anywhere, and when she said they had not, I asked her again, this time whether they had stopped somewhere for a drink. She denied it again.”
I was watching it all over again, watching myself, confident and self-assured, as I led her step by step to where I wanted her to go, a study in self-deception.
“I let her answer go and asked her instead about Paula Hawkins, her friend from college, her lesbian lover who knew everything about her affair with Jeremy Fullerton, and about the fact that she slept with other men as well. I wanted to let Ariella Goldman know that I knew things about her, things she didn't know I knew, things I was certain she didn't want anyone to know. Then, after I asked her that, I asked her about what she and Fullerton had been doing together in Europe. Then, after all that, I went back to the party at Lawrence Goldman's apartment and asked her again why Fullerton's wife left. She repeated her answer again that it was because she wasn't feeling well. I hit her with the question whether the reason she wasn't feeling well was because she had just accused her—Ariella Goldman—of having an affair with her husband.”
Peering into Albert Craven's pale blue eyes, I shook my head in chagrin at my own inexcusable mistake.
“I took her all the way back around, one question right on top of the other—closed it right down on her. Everything she had said had been a lie. I had her dead.”
Leaning against the arm of the heavily upholstered chair, I let my eye wander across the room to the oil painting above the fireplace that depicted the earthquake and fire of l906 that destroyed one San Francisco and gave birth to another.
“If it had just ended there, she would have been destroyed as a credible witness; more important, she would have become the best possible witness for the defense. I could have brought in the bartender from the St. Francis to testify that she was there that night with Fullerton. I could have brought in someone— Marissa or either one of you—to testify about what she really said to Fullerton's wife. I had Fullerton's administrative assistant, Robert Zimmerman, under subpoena to testify that she did not come back directly from Europe the way she said she had.
“Don't you see? That was all I would have needed. I could have asked the jury: Why was she lying? What was she trying to hide? What did she know that she didn't want them to know? She was the last person to see Jeremy Fullerton alive, and if she was lying—lying under oath—then …”
I looked again at the painting and felt a certain strange kinship with people who without warning were suddenly struck by disaster.
“I should have seen it coming,”I said as I slowly turned away from the earthquake and fire. “It should have been obvious. If I hadn't suspected anything before, I should have known something was going on when she lied about stopping somewhere before she dropped him off. The St. Francis is a public place, for God's sake!”I said with a helpless, self-deprecating laugh. “She might not have been famous then, but Fullerton was. She couldn't have thought that no one noticed or that no one was going to remember that he had been in a bar with a woman just a few minutes before he was murdered.”
I glimpsed at Bobby and tried to remember what it was like when we were both still young and everything was a game and we could play only the ones we liked.
“Meredith Fullerton—the senator's wife—told me the Gold-mans would manage to arrange things like this. I didn't pay much attention to it at the time; but even if I had, it never would have occurred to me that they'd figure out a way to use a criminal trial to do it.”
Albert Craven pressed his small manicured fingers together under his smooth-shaven chin. “Figured out a way to do what?”
“ To let everyone know that Ariella Goldman is having Jeremy Fullerton's baby. She said it would be like this. She said by the time the Goldmans got through, everyone would think that Ariella was the one left behind as the grieving widow.”
Craven tried to be helpful. “Well, even so, it hasn't done you any real harm.”
I was looking right at him and I barely heard a word he said. I had worked myself into a state where all I could think about was the sheer effrontery of what had been done.
“And the most astonishing part is that she was still lying, right up to the end: lying when she said Fullerton was leaving his wife; lying when she cried through those false tears of hers that she was having his baby. My God, that woman could lie!”
I looked around at Bobby and with a pained expression threw up my hands. “It takes a certain kind of genius to understand that the best way to tell a lie is to make it appear that you're being forced into telling the truth. She knew what she was doing right from the beginning. She let me catch her in a lie so that everyone would think she wanted to protect Jeremy Fullerton's reputation and save his wife any more pain.”
“How do you know she was lying—about having Fullerton's child?”asked Craven.
I realized what I had done. Until that moment I had not shared Meredith Fullerton's secret with anyone; no one, that is, except Marissa. But if I could justify telling her—and I was not sure I could—there was no excuse for telling anyone else. Or was there? What was it that Meredith Fullerton had said? That she might now have to share with the world the secret that she and her husband had shared only with each other, as the only way to keep Ariella Goldman from getting away with a lie.
“Jeremy Fullerton could not have children. His wife told me. She told me what she had never told anyone before because she had heard that Ariella was telling people that she was pregnant and that Fullerton was the father.”
“But if Ariella didn't know Fullerton couldn't have children,”said Craven, picking up the thread, “what did he tell her when she told him she was pregnant and that he was the father?”
“Who knows what Fullerton might have told her? But if that's what they were talking about that night in the bar at the St. Francis—if he told her he couldn't possibly be the father of her child, or if he just insisted he wasn't the father and that he wouldn't marry her—what do you think she would have done about it?”
“Are you saying you think Ariella Goldman murdered Jeremy Fullerton?”asked Craven in a way that suggested he would not be entirely surprised if I was.
Before I could answer, Bobby asked a question that seemed to settle the matter.
“Where would she have gotten the gun? If he told her at the bar, how could she suddenly find a cheap untraceable Saturday night special? It isn't very likely she always kept one on her or that Fullerton carried one around in the glove compartment of his car.”
“Perhaps he had already told her he wasn't going to marry her, and so she brought the gun with her that night, thinking she would give him one last chance to change his mind,”I said without conviction.
“What I really don't understand,”said Bobby, “is why she decided to go ahead and have the child. She could have had it aborted. Anyone to whom she had told that story about Fullerton would have drawn the logical conclusion: She got pregnant by a married man and handled it discreetly.”
“Perhaps she really did love Fullerton,”suggested Albert Craven. “Perhaps she really wants to have his child. But whether she loved him or not, I think Meredith Fullerton was exactly right about one thing at least: Everyone is now going to believe that Ariella is the one Jeremy Fullerton loved and left behind, and that the proof of that is the child she's carrying, the one whose parentage she had apparently been at such pains to conceal. Yes, I think Meredith Fullerton understood the Goldmans perfectly. This isn't the same country it used to be. Divorce, infidelity, a child born out of wedlock—none of that means anything anymore; the only thing that matters is how people feel about each other. I'll bet if you did a poll two weeks from now, you'd find a surprising number of people who believe that Fullerton and Ariella were really married.”